We recently connected with Rita Ernst and have shared our conversation below.

Rita, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

It is widely believed that company culture is the responsibility of the executive leaders. Thus, culture work, such as creating vision and mission statements and defining company values, occurs as a project. Executives gather in the boardroom for facilitated conversations to define the desired organizational culture that attracts potential employees and customers alike. A company-wide rollout follows. Workers are informed of the expected behaviors as management attempts to talk their way into a new way of being.

This approach is successful when this work codifies what already exists to a large extent within the thinking and actions of the team members. However, things fall apart quickly when the desired culture is predominantly aspirational. Here’s why.

Every person inside a company is an architect of its culture. This means that a company culture exists regardless of whether the executives prescribe it. It is identifiable in the stories and observations of team members at every level. And because culture is about behavior, operational policies and procedures often unwittingly reinforce it. In other words, the way people act at work is not random. They operate within established social norms, a.k.a. the existing culture.

Therefore, all cultural work in existing companies is multi-level and systemic change work to be done with the team, not to the team.

Rita, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Rita Ernst, the positivity influencer. I’m the author of “Show Up Positive” (2022) and the owner of Ignite Your Extraordinary. I teach individuals, teams, and organizations how to restore positivity at work and improve performance, culture, and personal well-being.

I hold an advanced degree in organizational psychology which is the study of how people come together to create business results. It is a social, behavioral, personality, and learning psychology mashup. I’ve spent my career examining thinking and behavior at the individual, group, and organizational levels to identify the convergence of individual happiness and fulfillment and team productivity to sustain high performance.

In my work, I have two passions.

[1] Helping distressed teams derailed by disruptive events return to their positive, happy, committed, high-performing selves.

[2] Helping businesses who’ve become victims of their skyrocketing success redesign their internal organization and operations so they can manage what they’ve built without sacrificing their lives and sanity.

My clients call me their secret weapon for success because my people-centered approach achieves sustainable improvements to key business metrics such as turnover, absenteeism, productivity, employee morale, and profit margins.

I activate the whole system to design workplaces so that people individually and collectively contribute and achieve their full potential. The by-product is

> reduced friction and stress
> increased decision confidence and execution
> improved communication
> expanded engagement and belonging
> strategic alignment

Every client says they wish we’d started our work together earlier in their journey.

Most of us spend most of our waking hours at work, meaning the majority of our daily conversations and interactions occur with our co-workers. And this is why having workplaces that fill our cups instead of depleting us is essential.

Doing nothing is a choice to stay stuck in your current situation, costing you and your team emotionally, physically, and financially. Every day without resolution allows the costs and damages to grow. Unfortunately, the resulting reputational harm from disappointed employees and customers is challenging to overcome.

The workforce is voting with their feet. Meaningful work and opportunities for growth and advancement are the new table stakes. My #ShowUpPositive movement is about activating your team to become change advocates and leaders in creating the workplace behaviors they desire.

People are hungry to experience happiness and fulfillment at work. They are tired of feeling trapped in a depleting cycle of discontent. I use my assessment, listening, and coaching expertise to build trust at all levels and help individuals give voice to their experiences and aspirations. Then we collaborate in conversations that create a shared call to action for restoring pride, teamwork, and commitment.

One of my key differentiators is the depth and breadth of skills I honed as an internal organizational development and human resources consultant in Fortune 200 companies, including
> strategic planning facilitation
> business meeting facilitation
> learning workshop design and delivery
> employee engagement process and tool design
> change management tools and implementation
> performance management systems design and implementation
> executive coaching

My substantial experience enables me to work in outcomes-based 90-day sprints and to guarantee measurable progress from the first engagement.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

At the beginning of 2020, my primary focus was small business owners, and I was implementing a new strategic partnering strategy. The shutdown heavily impacted my target audience. They were scrambling to get federal dollars and make payroll. All discussions about my services were defunct. I felt like I was on the on-ramp and ready to step on the gas pedal when I came to a complete stop. It was disheartening.

Coral Abood, a gifted corporate photographer and branding strategist, invited me to collaborate on a project featuring the stories of local small businesses. We wanted to help others in our community by magnifying their success and sparking hope for others. We called it the Pivot Project. Through our network and other sources, we identified local businesses finding a path forward despite the restrictions. We interviewed the owners, and I wrote the stories while Coral captured the stories through imagery. We then published the written and pictorial articles on Facebook.

That work gave me purpose and meaning during the second quarter of 2020. It was rewarding to capture and tell these success stories. I was inspired to find my pivot, which came during my guest appearance on a talk radio station. A business owner called in to express his struggle, and I knew I could help him achieve the transformation he wanted to create for his team.

This client engagement started the work that became the foundation for my book, “Show Up Positive” (June 2022). I quickly realized that culture work was no longer a “nice to do.” Culture derailment was happening everywhere, and I had developed an approach with consistent success in repairing the culture and increasing positivity at work.

I began to outline a book in my head that would allow me to share my knowledge and experience more broadly. Having caught the writing bug during the Pivot Project articles, I had confidence in my storytelling ability. So I began to write and quickly realized that more than publishing a book, my true agenda was to start a movement.

Team members need to stop waiting for executives and owners to make changes, especially since they have the power to do it themselves. “Show Up Positive” is a call to action for every person to recognize and wield their role as an architect of the team and company culture they desire.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I didn’t leave my corporate job to start my business. Initially, I called myself a freelance consultant. People who knew me recommended me to people who needed my services, and I took the work that fell in my lap.

The plan had been to return to a corporate position after a brief hiatus. I realized that a full-time job would not allow the flexibility required for me to give my family obligations the focus and attention I desired. So, turning my freelance work into a business became the default.

As a freelance person, I billed my clients an hourly rate for my work. So this is the practice I carried forward with my business. My thinking centered on a fair pay rate for someone doing my work as an employee. All my time as an employee reinforced this way of thinking which was completely wrong for running my own business.

It didn’t account for my costs of doing business.
It didn’t provide capital for growth.
It focused on me instead of the value I created for my clients.

I had to unlearn thinking like a paid employee and shift to thinking from a value creation economics model.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.igniteextraordinary.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igniteextraordinary/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/igniteextraordinary
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-ernst-positivity-influencer/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@igniteextraordinary

Image Credits
Coral Abood, Willow Tree Imaging